C6: Positioning content based on structural markup

Important Information about Techniques

See Understanding Techniques for WCAG Success Criteria for important information about the usage of these informative techniques and how they relate to the normative WCAG 2.0 success criteria. The Applicability section explains the scope of the technique, and the presence of techniques for a specific technology does not imply that the technology can be used in all situations to create content that meets WCAG 2.0.

Description

The objective of this technique is to demonstrate how visual appearance may be enhanced via style sheets while still maintaining a meaningful presentation when style sheets are not applied. Using the positioning properties of CSS2, content may be displayed at any position on the user's viewport. Using structural elements ensures that the meaning of the content can still be determined when styling is not available.

Examples

Example 1

In this example structural markup (definition lists) have been applied to the content. CSS has been used to style the content into columnar form. Each class absolutely positions the content into columns and the margins have been set to 0 to override the default behavior of user agents to display HTML definition lists with the DD element indented.

When style sheets are applied, the data are displayed in two columns of "Products" and "Locations." When the style sheets are not applied, the text appears in a definition list which maintains the structure and reading order.

Related Techniques

Tests

Procedure

Remove the style information from the document or turn off use of style sheets in the user agent.

Check that the structural relations and the meaning of the content are preserved.

Expected Results

Check #2 is true.

If this is a sufficient technique for a success criterion, failing this test procedure does not necessarily mean that the success criterion has not been satisfied in some other way, only that this technique has not been successfully implemented and can not be used to claim conformance.